Exploring and measuring the health resilience of urban buildings against the pandemic: A case study of Hong Kong public housing during COVID-19

Abstract

The worldwide spread of COVID-19 raises considerable concern about occupant health and pandemic prevention. The building plays a significant role in preventing and controlling the pandemic as most of the time people stay within the built environment. Even urban resilience is widely used to cope with urban changes, the concept of resilience has seldom been adopted at the building level for occupants' health during the pandemic. There is a lack of suitable measurement methods specially designed for health resilience. Consequently, this study designs the framework of “building health resilience (BHR)” to reveal buildings’ ability to resist the pandemic spread within occupants, and develops the BHR model to measure the building performance in health resilience. The case study of Hong Kong public housing under COVID-19 reveals that implementing BHR framework and measurement approach are effective for single buildings and building groups within certain areas or during different periods. This study contributes to proposing BHR and developing BHR measurement approach by considering the building scale and external pandemic situation in nearby local area of the building. The BHR model is quite flexible to adapt to diverse disturbance scenarios to quantify the BHR performance, provides valuable results to find out weak buildings during the pandemic spread, and takes targeted actions toward healthy and resilient buildings.